Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor - Police Racism: A Manufactured Crisis Aired: 2021-01-08 Duration: 11:08 === Police Fatalities Statistics (04:55) === [00:00:03] Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance. [00:00:07] The United States is in an uproar over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. [00:00:14] There have been demonstrations in over 400 cities and looting and arson in every major U.S. city. [00:00:21] Why are so many people in the streets? [00:00:23] Because they believe that American society is systematically racist and that the police brutalize and even casually murder black men. [00:00:33] The news constantly tells them that the police are racist, and many people think the gruesome video of the death of George Floyd bears this out. [00:00:43] But let's look at the facts. [00:00:45] Some may surprise you. [00:00:47] Police in America make 12 to 13 million arrests every year. [00:00:53] How often does this lead to the death of an unarmed black person? [00:00:57] We know the exact number thanks to a Washington Post database of every killing by the police. [00:01:03] No one else has better figures. [00:01:05] So please, stop and guess how many unarmed blacks are killed every year. [00:01:11] 200? 500? [00:01:13] Last year, the figure was 9. Just 9. And that number is going down, not up. [00:01:21] In 2015, police killed 38 unarmed blacks. [00:01:25] In 2017, they killed 21. Well, what about white people? [00:01:30] Last year, police killed 19 unarmed whites in addition to the 9 unarmed blacks. [00:01:37] In almost every case, whether the person who died was black or white, an inquiry found that the officers' actions were justified. [00:01:47] Now, you may find this hard to believe, but in 2019, the chances of being unarmed, arrested, and then killed by the police were higher for whites than for blacks. [00:02:00] For both races, it was something very rare. [00:02:03] One out of 292,000 arrests for blacks and one out of 283,000 arrests for whites. [00:02:13] But, to repeat, the chances of an unarmed white man being arrested and killed by the police are slightly higher than for an unarmed black man. [00:02:22] What about the people the police kill who are armed? [00:02:27] Since 2015, When the Post began tracking these numbers, the police have killed about 1,000 people every year. [00:02:36] One quarter of them were black. [00:02:38] Now this is about twice their share of the population, which is 13%. [00:02:43] So is this proof of police racism? [00:02:47] Probably not. [00:02:49] The data tell us that blacks are considerably more likely than whites to commit crimes and therefore come into potentially violent contact with the police. [00:02:59] Here are numbers for 2018, the most recent year available. [00:03:04] Blacks accounted for 37% of arrests for all violent crimes, 54% of arrests for robbery, and 53% of arrests for murder. [00:03:15] In the overwhelming majority of cases, it's people who commit crimes like these, who threaten the police and others, who are shot by the police. [00:03:27] For blacks to be only 25% of the people police killed can seem like a surprisingly low figure. [00:03:34] Here's another statistic. [00:03:36] Every year, criminals kill about 120 to 150 police officers, and we know from this FBI table that every year, on average, about 35% of cop killers are black. [00:03:50] So to repeat: Blacks are 13% of the population and account for 25% of the people killed by police. [00:03:58] But look at these high levels of involvement in violent crime. [00:04:02] They suggest it would not be surprising if blacks accounted for more than 25% of the people killed by the police. [00:04:11] Now, I have mentioned the high black percentages of arrests for violent crime. [00:04:17] You may think that these figures reflect police racism. [00:04:21] And not racial differences in crime rates. [00:04:24] You may think that biased police are arresting innocent blacks and letting guilty whites go and that's why the black arrest rates are so high. [00:04:35] Well, we have very valuable survey data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that disproves this view. [00:04:43] As this page explains every year, Data are obtained from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 interviews on criminal victimization, involving 160,000 unique persons in about 95,000 === Police Bias Debunked (05:00) === [00:04:59] households. The government asks these 160,000 people if they have been a victim of violent crime. [00:05:07] They're then asked lots of details, including the race of the person who attacked them. [00:05:13] Many of these crimes are not even reported to the police. [00:05:16] So the numbers in this survey are always greater than the numbers of arrests for the same crimes. [00:05:22] However, and this is the key point, the racial proportions track almost perfectly. [00:05:29] For example, the American public says that over half the muggers were black. [00:05:35] So when half the muggers, the police arrest, turn out to be black, is that proof of police bias? [00:05:41] No. The police are doing what they're supposed to do: arrest criminals without regard to race. [00:05:48] There have been scientific studies of possible police bias against blacks and Hispanics. [00:05:54] This paper, published last year, is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, probably the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the country. [00:06:05] It built a sophisticated database for all the fatal police shootings in 2015 and looked at them from every possible racial angle. [00:06:15] Its findings? [00:06:16] Under the heading"Significance," it wrote,"We find no evidence of anti-black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers." You will not be shot, [00:06:34] in other words, by the police unless you are threatening them in a dangerous way. [00:06:38] You will not be shot because of your race. [00:06:41] And this is true of officers of all races. [00:06:45] Roland Fryer is a black economist at Harvard. [00:06:48] He was angry after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. [00:06:53] So he did his own research on police killing. [00:06:55] He carefully studied 1,332 police shootings in 10 big city police departments. [00:07:02] When he compared the circumstances of each killing, he too could find no evidence of police bias. [00:07:10] If anything, police were more likely to shoot a non-threatening white than a non-threatening black person. [00:07:18] Professor Fryer said,"It was the most surprising research result of my career." Well, why did Roland Fryer find it surprising? [00:07:28] Because just like the people who are demonstrating now, he believed what he read in the papers. [00:07:34] And let me give you a very relevant example. [00:07:37] On June 3rd, just two days ago, the New York Times published a long article with this headline, Minneapolis police use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites. [00:07:50] Sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? [00:07:53] But this article, Says nothing, nothing at all about racial differences in crime rates or arrest rates. [00:07:59] Not one word. [00:08:01] It would be like learning that the police were seven times more likely to use force against men living in Minneapolis than against women and getting outraged over anti-male bias. [00:08:12] But wouldn't it be important to know that men were much more likely than women to commit crime, to be arrested, resist arrest? [00:08:20] Wouldn't male behavior? [00:08:22] And not police bias. [00:08:24] Explain why police use force on men more often than on women? [00:08:28] So, what was the situation in Minneapolis? [00:08:32] Here are graphs taken from a Minneapolis Police Department report from 2009 to 2014. [00:08:40] Here are the racial percentages of victims, suspects, and arrests for an aggregate of violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault. [00:08:50] Blacks were 12 times more likely than people of all other races combined to be suspects in these crimes and 9.5 times more likely to be arrested. [00:09:02] In light of these figures, can it be surprising that the Minneapolis police use force on blacks seven times more often than on whites? [00:09:11] Once again, the reasonable conclusion is that the police are reacting to behavior, not race. [00:09:20] For the Times, not to have included this information about racial differences and arrests is either grossly negligent or just plain dishonest. [00:09:29] This kind of reckless reporting gives people a completely false impression of the police. [00:09:36] Now, I'm not trying to justify what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. [00:09:41] He was a big guy. [00:09:43] He was resisting arrest to the point that even with cuffs on, A team of three officers couldn't get him into a squad car. === System Working Justly (01:23) === [00:09:51] The police had a problem on their hands. [00:09:54] But keeping a knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes may have been homicide. [00:10:00] Of course, the solution is to indict the officer and punish him if he's guilty. [00:10:06] But even if he is guilty, who can be sure that race had anything to do with what he did? [00:10:12] He might have restrained a violent white criminal. [00:10:17] The solution to all this is not to demonstrate and riot against police racism, for which there is so little hard evidence. [00:10:27] There may be some bad apples among police officers, but the system is working just as it should. [00:10:34] Almost without fail, police deal with criminals properly, without regard to race. [00:10:40] I know that there is a tremendous head of steam built up behind the idea of police racism. [00:10:46] But it's not the police who need reform. [00:10:50] It's the media. [00:10:52] This crisis will not end until the press stop presenting a false and dangerously inflamed picture of the American justice system. [00:11:01] Rioting and looting are wrong, no matter what the reason. [00:11:06] Rioting and looting over an illusion.